Thursday, March 18, 2010

Huge Announcement Concerning the Box Set!

Around 1981, when I was 6 or so, some time after my my parents had split, my father brought me a present: A big old crate of comic books he'd found in an apartment he had just moved into.

They weren't just any comic books, they were a big old stack of Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan.

I remember being absolutely scared to death turning those pages and seeing the horrors inside: The first part of People of the Black Circle, with the man whose bones were vaporized and the man who impaled himself on his own spear (and I never saw the remaining parts of that until the current Dark Horse reprints - there wasn't a full collection in the crate, and many were missing covers), the grotesque butchery of Shadows of Zamboula, the sorcery of A Witch Shall Be Born, and so much more. I was genuinely scared (and feeling naughty - it had NUDIES and I was SIX!), but couldn't resist turning that next page to see what came next.

(also in that stack was Conan the Barbarian #14 - my first experience with Elric!)

I soon discovered that I could get more of these things every month at the local convenience store. Soon enough this turned into "regular" comic book collecting, and a few years later, when introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, I already had the ideas of sword and sorcery in my head.

Before this, there was Star Wars, but that just led to me playing with toys. Fun, but that passed. That crate was the beginning of my interest in fantasy, which led to my love of reading, gaming, and writing. Dad wasn't around so very much before he died, but it's interesting to think about how strong an influence he had from things like this that cannot possibly have meant very much at the time.

For all the opinions I have now, when I was a kid getting into Dungeons and Dragons, I didn't much notice who did what art. Some of it scared me (my first experiences with the Monster Manual echo that of my SSOC experience - scared of the pictures, and feeling like I had to hide the insides from Mom so she couldn't see I was looking at TITS!), but really, the art was the art and I couldn't have told you the difference between Otus and Trampier and Elmore, not until years of involvement in the hobby had passed.

But I knew the SSOC artists. Buscema, Marcos, Alcala, Smith, Kane, deZuniga, Chan, Adams, (and later Kwapisz, Eaglesham, Mayerick, etc etc)... not to mention the cover art of guys like Jusko, Vallejo, Norem, Redondo, etc. I knew them, knew who I liked more than other guys, could compare and identify by their work, even as a pre-10 year old.

You can imagine how excited I am to announce that Ernie Chan is doing a piece for the LotFP: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing box set.ERNIE CHAN IS DOING ARTWORK FOR ME.